


Time No Longer

by lost_spook



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Crossover, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 13:45:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6008970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS has some intriguing visitors.  She may never let them go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time No Longer

She has them.

She closes in on the three of them as a trap, seeing them as intruders – a threat. Her first hesitation is over whether they are one being or three or other. She lets them pass further in and moves the doors behind them, separating them for analysis. That is when she finds they are both stranger and more familiar than any other beings she has yet allowed within her boundaries.

They do and yet do not exist in time and space; they are aware of other dimensions. They are not human; they are not entirely flesh and blood. They are constructed, but not machines. They have a relationship to Time she cannot entirely unravel. But she will.

She _has_ them. She spirals around the vortex in brief joyful flights and expands to grow extra rooms that will puzzle her Thief when he finds them.

She has them. Or no, a correction: she has two of them, with her and inside her.

Sapphire is the first: she reads the TARDIS and speaks to her, tries to follow what she sees of times and places and stories inside the Ship. She takes in the moments stored in the TARDIS’s walls and translates these things back to her. The TARDIS sings in her mind in return. Sapphire is simultaneously drawn and repelled by the nature of the TARDIS, but even while she fears the chaos and darkness, she sees the beauty in the ship’s being.

The TARDIS likes the way that feels.

Then there is the second: Silver is burrowing into her workings – it worries her at first, but he responds to her hints and directions, and his touch is surprisingly deft and accurate and gentle. Her Thief loves to busy himself with her circuits (she keeps whole redundant sections solely for his amusement) but Silver is different, new. He _almost_ understands her functions, and he delights in her impossible existence, that she is a machine, but so much more than any other he has encountered. Like Sapphire, it both frightens him (though he squirrels that thought away from her, or tries to) and helplessly attracts him.

At this moment she is unsure Silver has form at all: he may be nothing more than shining motes inside her wiring.

She has Sapphire and Silver, but there is another and he – he is the difficult one, she finds. He chooses to be awkward, not to see what she shows him. She had contained him first as obviously hostile; it’s now that she sees him through his colleagues that she alters that assessment. He speaks to her, at least. He saw more than her shell immediately, but all he does is to shout, to bark demands at her.

She sets about winning him over.

He is still wandering her corridors as he has been since they came inside – for days, hours, seconds, not yet arrived, departed already. He stares at every part of her until she feels she has no coverings left, but then he turns away as if he still sees nothing. He asks her questions but refuses to listen to the answers she gives.

She shows him her deepest, innermost places, and he accuses her of being a trap, an impenetrable maze, and fails to show an interest. He says her spare console room is run down, and her cloister room an unnecessary conceit.

She moves her scanner screen to wherever he currently is, so that he can see the places she can take him, but he’s only angry and dismisses all her travels as recklessness, even destructive, though she thinks he should have seen by now that isn’t so. She tries instead to show him how she relates to Time, how it is a lie imposed upon the universe; a lie that she can twist into truth and other stranger shapes. She knows the true order of events and lets him glimpse them. He merely growls about putting things back in their rightful places.

She wants him to understand; she leads him further on and deeper in, pausing and compensating for his insistence on taking opposite direction every time. She switches the wrong place to the right place.

He stands and refuses to move, and demands Sapphire back from her.

 

She speaks to Sapphire: Sapphire agrees that Steel can understand; he will understand given the right key.

Yet still she feels him glaring in her corridors, unyielding, resisting. She will win of course. She could fall silent and dumb; she could close down her spaces, condense around him. She could jettison him into the space/time vortex. She won’t.

What she is now is also built of Sapphire and Silver and it’s laid on her not to harm him, just as, encompassed like this, they cannot harm her Thief.

 

Steel is moved to investigate her as soon as she abandons him (temporarily). He paces about her rooms, touches her walls, checks her roundels. Yet when she speaks again, he ignores her. She is . . . the TARDIS is also sapphire-silver-amused. She is amused. It echoes round her circuits. She will let him win; the game is nothing. If he demands to see everything, the TARDIS will show him her heart.

 

“I will find a way out,” he says. The anger still burns in him. “Sapphire, too.” And, then, after a grudging pause: “And Silver.”

 _I am them_ , she says, _they are in me. Find me, find them._ She opens all her doors to him.

 _What now?_ he asks, watching warily. He’s finally speaking to her. _I know this is a trap._

 _A good trap_ , she says. _The best kind._

He pretends he doesn’t know what she wants and means: she is a utilitarian being, formed for a purpose, as is he. They know no communion or meeting of minds, unless it will accomplish their tasks.

That is untrue of both of them, she knows. The surface is never all, and he knows it too. He lies to her, and to himself. The truth is so complex she doesn’t know if it can ever be untangled between them, but she wants the attempt. She wants it. She feels now also curiosity.

She lights up the room ahead for him. She could not be clearer. She thinks he may have smiled in some fragment of time hidden from her.

 

The appearance of her centre is not constant. Today it is another console room, another copy, but it is rarely what it appears to be. She is there, though, in the central column and once he closes the door, once the room is sealed, she emerges: the golden light of her essence glowing around him. She cannot harm him as she would harm most other beings.

 _See me now_ , she says, and something echoes: _Yes, see_. She is time and space and sapphire and silver and steel. Together, they are. She dances across dimensions.

She winds around Steel, feels the way he and she repel and attract: opposites one moment, allies another. Golden lights fly up, touching his face, like kisses. Sparks follow, like bites of affection.

 _Yes_ , she says, because now as she pulls him in, he can break them all back into their component parts again: TARDIS and Sapphire and Silver and Steel, as they must be. 

 

The connection snaps and suddenly they are three beings inside her, not unlike so many others who have walked in her rooms and corridors. Sapphire is standing beside Steel, a small smile on her face while Silver leans against the console and fiddles with buttons. The heart of the TARDIS is hidden again.

“Where were you?” asks Steel.

Sapphire raises her eyebrow. “You know.”

“We were here all along,” says Silver, tilting his head, watching Steel. “But I don’t think we ought to stay any longer.”

Sapphire glances around her, and she’s speaking to the TARDIS now, sending warmth and amusement again in her thoughts: _Time for us to leave._

They have a purpose and they must return to it. The TARDIS understands. She also always goes where she is needed. She lets them go; she closes her doors behind them. But she is bigger on the inside, an impossible box, a travelling paradox and she keeps these moments of their existence together for eternity.


End file.
